Australian naked DSL guide

Rating Consumer Naked DSL Services

 

The great growth areas in the ADSL market has to be the growth of “Naked DSL” services, in which consumers give up their telephone connection and buy DSL over a “no PSTN service” copper connection.

From just a handful of providers offering Naked DSL services a year ago, there are now at least 26 providers – both owners of DSL infrastructure and resellers – now listing Naked DSL services.

There is, of course, an important consideration for the customer: what do you do about the telephone? Your options are (a) to do without a fixed line completely, and instead rely on the mobile; (b) to buy some variety of voice service from your ISP; or (c) to use a VoIP service provided by a third party. I’ll discuss this in greater detail later.

And as an example of just how quickly this market moves: after analysis was completed, Internode announced a reduced price for one of its services. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to incorporate the new plan in what is a moderately complex price model!

Where activation fees are given, these are included across three scenarios – a customer buying a “no contract” service, a 12-month contract, and a 24-month contract. In the case of the “no contract” service, I have assumed that the customer stays with a provider for 12 months for the purpose of including activation fees in the analysis. If there is a separate activation fee for a VoIP service, this is included in the analysis. Wherever possible, activation fees are analysed on the assumption that the customer already owns a modem (in other words, “BYO modem” services are preferred, where this could be determined from the price sheet).

The greatest surprise of this analysis, by the way, is that the best value is mostly not among the most expensive plans.

 

Judging value

 

Value is a very personal thing – a “value judgement”, if you will. For some people, the cheapest plan is the cheapest plan, and that’s all they care about.

But the “value” of the plan can also be viewed relative to the price of the data – for example, what’s the effective price per Gigabyte of the data included in the plan?

The problem with measuring value solely on the per-GB price is that it will skew the “value” towards the more expensive plans – because the most expensive plans typically have much higher download allowances relative to their price.

To try and resolve these inconsistencies with the analysis, I’m going to present a variety of analyses, to allow users to pick out services that best match their own interests.

First, let’s sum up the market as a whole. The 25 providers analysed in this article offer 117 different Naked DSL plans. These are listed in Table 1.

There are three key “variables” taken into account in the analysis which follows:

 

Table 1 – Providers Analysed

 

Table 2 – Plan Prices

 

Table 3 – Download Limits

 

A small number of plans (two from Optus and one from T&B Internet) were excluded because they are described as offering unlimited off-peak downloads. This made it impossible to compare “effective price per gigabyte” with other plans.

 

Naked DSL with VoIP

 

 

 

Naked DSL – No VoIP

 

 

 

Note: Internode has a 240GB service at the same monthly subscription price as Vintek, but with a higher activation fee.

 

Plans by Download Band – With VoIP

 

 

 

Plans by Download Band – No VoIP